Introduction

My corpus is on John Mayer, specifically his albums. I am an avid listener so studying and analyzing his music would of course be an interesting topic for me. With eight studio albums, John Mayer has a well-rounded discography that arguably spans across many different genres such as blues, pop, rock, folk, and country. This leaves significant room for analysis into his music. Having a discography that spans across various genres allows for different directions to be taken in terms of investigation. The first possibility is to look into how John Mayer’s music has changed over time. The second is that a comparison can be made between one or all of his studio albums and their possible respective genres to conclude how John Mayer adheres to said genre. And lastly, is to conclude if John Mayer follows any trends in his music that allow us to possibly define John Mayer’s main genre of music.

Based on the time frame and requirements of this assignment, I’ve chosen to do the second possibility mentioned above. Specifically, I will compare John Mayer’s Sob Rock album to 80s music. In order to do so I’ve chosen two different ways to complete this comparison. The first is to compare it to a Spotify playlist of 80’s hits and the second is to a specific subgenre of 80s music that the music on Sob Rock could match. The objective will essentially be to see how well John Mayer’s Sob Rock album compares to actual 80s music. An important consideration to note is that John Mayer obviously did not produce Sob Rock with the intent of replicating 80s music. The aim therefore is to see if and how well it adheres to the 80s genre and subgenre.

Using the Spotify API, data from each song off of each album can be pulled and analyzed. Important considerations must be accounted for first and foremost. Although the Spotify API is a powerful tool for music analysis, it is not perfect in its analysis of music. Certain criteria are poorly measured or immeasurable for the Spotify API, elements such as emotions and lyricism are difficult to analyze through the software. However, there are tools that will represent the data and findings that are sought after.

A Deep Dive into Sob Rock

Various magazines, including Guitar.com and Variety magazine, have already compared the album to 80’s pop music based on its tone as well as its aesthetic. This part of the research will focus on Sob Rock as a whole as well as analyze some individual songs to compare to 80’s pop music. Furthermore, the style of Sob Rock has been mentioned in articles about the subgenre of 80’s pop called ‘Divorcecore’.

First will be an analysis and comparison of Sob Rock and general 80s pop music to see how John Mayer’s album lines up with the 80’s pop genre. Second will be an in-depth analysis of various songs from the album with songs from the ‘Divorcecore’ subgenre. The songs mentioned in the Esquire article will be used to compare the Sob Rock tracks to. In order to utilize the Spotify API, a playlist called “DivorceCore” has been provided by Dave Holmes, writer of the Esquire article.

Comparing Sob Rock as a whole to general pop music from the 80s

The two graphs are a side-by-side representation of the energy, tempo and instrumentalness of the tracks on Sob Rock and Spotify’s “80’s Hits” playlist. These variables seem appropriate for determining the ‘intensity’ of a track. In addition to energy and tempo instrumentalness is another variable that has been added to the two graphs on the left. Not only do we see data points on the scatter plots a a curved line of best fit has been added as well to try and better show trends in the data. When comparing the plots is important to remember that a limiting factor of the first scatter plot is that there aren’t enough plots due to the limited number of tracks on the Sob Rock album.

By comparing the two scatter plots it is clear that they do not share many similarities as demonstrated by comparing the two trend lines in each scatter plot. The line in the first scatter plot shows a somewhat upside-down W shape where it starts slow goes up high has a small upside-down bell curve and ends low. The trend line in the second scatter plot starts high dips down comes back up and ends significantly lower. In the first scatter plot this shows that a track tends to have a higher energy when it has a tempo of around 100 bpm or 130 bpm. For the second scatter plot, the trend line suggests that energy is highest when the bpm of a track is 90 or 140. Although this is different to the first scatter plot, this does fall within +/- 10 bpm margin which is still moderately significant.

Comparing Sob Rock to “DivorceCore”

On the previous page, the energy and tempo of the Sob Rock tracks and the 80’s hits playlist tracks were compared. This showed limited similarity between the two. However, when we compare the Sob Rock tracks to the tracks of the DivorceCore playlist a somewhat similar pattern can be seen. Just by looking at the shape of these trend lines on the scatter plots we can see a similarity in the energy-tempo relationship. Although the shape of the trend lines are similar, the two scatter plots do differ on basis of where on the x-axis the peaks in the trend lines are. As shown on the Sob Rock scatter plot, the peaks were around the 90 and 130 bpm. On the divorce core scatter plot the peaks are just under 100 bpm and around the 160 bpm mark.

By comparing the scatter plots of both the 80’s Hits playlist and the DivorceCore playlist to the Sob Rock tracks some analysis can be made. The Sob Rock tracks share similarities with both the 80’s Hits playlist and the DivorceCore playlist. In terms of tempo, the Sob Rock tracks are relatively similar to the 80’s Hits tracks while the Sob Rock and DivorceCore tracks are similar in energy. Despite the difference in where the ‘dip’ in the trend line occurs in both scatter plot, the similarity in the shape of the trend line is still significant.

Looking at how the tracks are clustered

The dendrogram on the left shows how the tracks on the DivorceCore playlist have been clustered. The playlist includes a John Mayer song which means that observing how this song is categorized will indicate if Sob Rock could be consistent with 80’s music, specifically DivorceCore songs. The John Mayer song in question is “I Guess I Just Feel Like”.

By looking at the martix, there doesn’t appear to be any sort of pattern that emerges. By looking along the right side of the dendrogram three clear clusters of songs can be observed. The clusters along the x-axis are not as clearcut. It can be argued that there are six clusters, with the biggest being the largest grouping of yellow on the bottom of the matrix. When observing the John Mayer within this dataset, it fits in well. The magnitude of most of the variables is shown to be similar to three or four other songs. On one hand this shows a likelihood that other John Mayer songs from this album might fit in with 80’s music as the horizontal pattern of “I Guess I Just Feel Like” does not differ greatly from many other songs’ horizontal patterns on the dendrogram. On the other hand, a tendency of John Mayer’s, as shown through surface level analysis, is that songs differ quite a bit from each other. Therefore, it is also likely that other songs from the same album might not fit in with 80’s music as well as “I Guess I Just Feel Like”.

Are there any similarities in chroma?

Listening through the songs presented in the Esquire article, I noticed a similarity in timbre between “One Step Up” by Bruce Springsteen and “Shouldn’t Matter but It Does” by John Mayer. Self-similarity models allow for a representation of timbre, through mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), for comparison and analysis. The two self-similarity models show the MFCCs of the two songs in question. The two self-similarity matrices on the left representative of two songs, the left one from John Mayer’s album and the other from the DivorceCore playlist. By looking at both individually patterns can be seen for each. The clear structure can be seen in the left matrix while the structure of “One Step Up” is more subtle. When comparing the two, some similarities in patterns within each visualization can be seen. The similarities among the two visualizations are weak however and will lead to a further investigation into timbre rather than chroma.

In the left matrix, a significant change in chroma can be seen around 125s (2:05) mark. When listening to the song, an interlude occurs leading into the next verse. This is more likely what the Spotify feature is picking up on. The right matrix demonstrates a constant oscillation in chroma. This can be seen in the checkered pattern between yellow and blue. The structure of this song is hard to make out solely based on the chroma matrix.

Self-Smiliarity Matrix to demonstrate timbre

Timbre is an element that some may find too vague to describe objectively or a variable that a program, such as the Spotify API, cannot understand accurately.

The first set of ceptstrogram shows that the timbre of the song is fairly consistent with only a handful of noticeable changes. The left cepstrogram does not differ from the chroma matrix shown on the previous page. The shape and major structural events appear in the same places in the timbre matrix. Equally, the cepstrogram on the right show that there’s a lot of repetition in timbre through out the song. By listening to the John Mayer song, distinct structural segments can be heard clearly; however, this isn’t fully demonstrated through the Spotify features. A reason for this, might be the lack of difference between the segments thus Spotify cannot separate them. In the right matrix, three clear yellow lines appear, which could allude to structural changes. These lines appear at the 100s (1:40), 110s (1:50), and 150s (2:30) marks. Based on the matrix alone, it can be inferred that the timbre has changed. This is confirmed by listening to the song. These moments when Bruce Springsteen sings in a higher register, indicating a different segment in the structure of the song.

How well does John Mayer’s album Sob Rock compare to the 80’s pop genre of “DivorceCore”?

In this project, various methods of analysis have been used to gain an insight into John Mayer’s music and how well it compared to 80’s pop music as well as the subgenre of 80’s pop “DivorceCore”.

Scatter plots were used in the first stage of the analysis to compare the energy and tempo of the entire Sob Rock album to the Spotify’s “80’s Hits” playlist. Applying a curved trend line to both graphs showed a few minor similarities. Both trend lines had a peak to them. Despite the difference in shape, these peaks fell within a +/- 10 bpm margin on the other scatter plot.

The second set of scatter plots compare the energy and tempo of the “DivorceCore” playlist and the Sob Rock album. Unlike with the other set of scatter plots, the trend lines on these scatter plots shared a similar shape, an upside-down W. A major difference is where the peaks and low points of the trend lines are. On the first graph there are two piece, one at the 100 bpm mark and another at the 160 bpm mark, with a low around 125 bpm. The Sob Rock scatter plot shows peaks around 100 bpm and 130 bpm, with a low point at 115 bpm. This yielded a slightly stronger similarity then the other set of scatter plots.